Character Limits on Every Major Social Platform

Most people hit a character limit at the worst possible moment: the caption is written, the post button is greyed out, and something has to go. Knowing the caps ahead of time turns that into a drafting constraint instead of a last-minute amputation.

Below is the full cheat sheet, current as of 2026. The more useful number in most rows is not the hard cap but the truncation point — where the platform stops showing your text and hides the rest behind "more". That is the real limit for anything you want read. For the underlying mechanics of how these counts are calculated, see The Complete Guide to Counting Words and Characters.

The Master Table

Platform	Field	Hard limit	Visible before truncation
X (Twitter)	Post	280 (25,000 on Premium)	280
X	Bio	160	160
X	Display name	50	50
X	Handle	15	15
Instagram	Caption	2,200	~125
Instagram	Bio	150	150
Instagram	Alt text	100	n/a
Facebook	Post	63,206	~477
Facebook	Page intro	101	101
LinkedIn	Post	3,000	~140–210
LinkedIn	Headline	220	~60 in feed
LinkedIn	About section	2,600	~265
LinkedIn	Connection note	300	300
TikTok	Caption	2,200	~100
TikTok	Bio	80	80
YouTube	Video title	100	~70 in search
YouTube	Description	5,000	~157 above the fold
Pinterest	Pin title	100	~40 in grid
Pinterest	Pin description	500	~50
Reddit	Post title	300	~300
Reddit	Text post	40,000	~400
Threads	Post	500	500
Bluesky	Post	300	300
Mastodon	Post	500 (server-configurable)	500
Google Search	Title tag	~60 characters	pixel-width based
Google Search	Meta description	~155–160	pixel-width based
Email	Subject line	no hard cap	~40 on mobile, ~60 desktop
SMS	Segment	160 GSM-7 / 70 UCS-2	n/a

The Rows That Behave Strangely

Four of these do not work the way a plain character count suggests.

X counts URLs as 23 characters, always

Paste a 140-character tracking URL into a post and X charges you 23 characters for it, because every link is replaced with a t.co shortcut of fixed length. This works in your favour: a post with two links has 234 characters of actual writing available, not whatever the raw string suggests. Any generic counter will report the raw number and understate your remaining space, so subtract manually.

Media attachments — images, video, quoted posts — cost nothing against the 280.

SMS is billed, not just limited

An SMS is not truncated at 160 characters; it is split, and each part is charged separately. Worse, concatenated messages carry a header that eats seven characters, so a two-part message allows 153 characters per segment rather than 160. That means:

• 160 characters = 1 segment
• 161 characters = 2 segments (306 characters of capacity)
• 307 characters = 3 segments

A single emoji anywhere in the message forces UCS-2 encoding for the entire message, dropping the limit to 70 characters per segment (67 when concatenated). A 150-character message with one smiley goes from one segment to three, tripling the send cost across a campaign.

Google truncates by pixels, not characters

Title tags and meta descriptions have no enforced limit at all — you can write 400 characters and Google will accept them. What happens is visual truncation in the results page, based on rendered width in pixels, roughly 600px for titles and 920px for descriptions on desktop. A title full of narrow characters like "i", "l", and "t" survives longer than one full of "W" and "M".

Character counts are a proxy for this, which is why 60 and 155 are the conventional targets. If a snippet matters, the Meta Description SERP Previewer & Optimizer renders the actual result the way Google will and shows you where the ellipsis falls, which no character count can do.

LinkedIn's real limit is the first two lines

The 3,000-character cap is generous and almost nobody reaches it. The number that governs performance is the truncation point: somewhere between 140 and 210 characters depending on screen width, after which readers must tap "see more". Everything past that point is only read by people you have already convinced. Treat the first 200 characters as the entire post and the rest as the footnote.

Writing to a Limit Without Fighting It

A few habits make the caps stop being a problem.

Front-load, always. Instagram shows ~125 characters, TikTok ~100, LinkedIn ~200, Facebook ~477. None of these are coincidences — every platform surfaces roughly the first sentence or two. Put the claim, the question, or the number in the opening line and use the remaining space for support.

Draft long, then cut. Writing directly into a character meter produces stilted text. Write the version you mean, then cut. Cutting 40 percent of a finished draft nearly always improves it; writing 60 percent of a draft rarely does.

Check with-spaces, not without. Every platform in the table counts spaces, line breaks, and punctuation. Paste into the Character Counter and read the with-spaces figure. It updates live, so you can watch a limit approach while you trim rather than discovering it on submit.

Watch the line breaks. Whitespace-heavy formatting reads well on LinkedIn and Instagram but a blank line between paragraphs costs two characters each time. Six paragraph breaks in a 280-character post is 12 characters — over four percent of your budget.

Count words for cross-platform planning. If you are adapting one message to several destinations, think in words: roughly 47 words fills an X post, 200 words fills the visible part of a LinkedIn post, and 350 words fills an Instagram caption. The Word Counter is faster for that kind of comparison, and the character-to-word conversion is covered in How Many Words Is 1,000 Characters?.

Limits Change; Truncation Points Change More

Hard caps are stable — X has been at 280 since 2017, Instagram at 2,200 for longer than that. Truncation points shift constantly, because they depend on interface layout, device width, and whatever a platform's design team changed last quarter. Treat the "visible" column as a planning estimate with a margin, not a specification. If a post absolutely must be readable without a tap, aim for 80 percent of the figure listed and you will be safe through the next redesign.